Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 27: Computational Biophysics

BP 27.2: Talk

Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 10:00–10:15, H43

Electrochromic shift calculations reveal spectral tuning in animal rhodopsins — •Florimond Collette, Marcel Schmidt am Busch, and Thomas Renger — Institut für Theoretische Physik, Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Altenberger Strasse 69, 4040 Linz, Austria

Rhodopsins are biological pigment-protein complexes found in photoreceptor cells of the retina. Within the framework of a two-step quantum chemical/electrostatic calculation scheme [1] that has recently been successfully applied to reveal the functional states of BLUF photoreceptors [2], we estimated absorption shifts of the retinal chromophore for a series of site-directed mutants. We eventually explain the variations of the maximal absorbance in the red- and green-sensitive visual pigments. Our results are in excellent agreement with recent experimental studies [3] and suggest that the maximum spectral sensitivity in animal rhodopsins is dominated by electrostatic tuning.

[1] T. Renger et al., Photosynth. Res. 116, 367 (2013).
[2] F. Collette et al., J. Phys. Chem. B 118, 11109 (2014).
[3] W. Wang et al., Science 338, 1340 (2012).